All of this happened not without a fight though!
We spent the past couple of days anxiously watching the drains to see just how much was coming out. On Thursday it was 50ml, Friday was 15ml and Saturday was barely 5ml. We knew that the magic number was under 20ml; so when the doctors were conferring with one another they cautiously said maybe on Saturday the drain could come out. But then the surgeons came in and said "Maybe in a couple of days it could come out". If you ever get put through an experience like this; expect that nobody is on the same page. You will have so many people telling you so many different things; we have learned to just wait and see.
But in the end it was decided it could come out and Riley was not on board. Chalk it up to so many times over this past week us having to trot her off to do something uncomfortable and trying to encourage her that it was okay. Pretty soon you don't buy it anymore. So she resisted as much as she could but in the end the job got done. Once again Riley was a wireless kid and with that comes some perks; they decided that we could take her off the ward and go explore the hospital. So we spent the afternoon going to the starlight room where she got a mermaid picture painted on her arm, played in the gardens, the playground and even had afternoon tea in the cafe.
It was so nice to see her back to her old self and we didn't have to chase behind her with all the tubes
making sure we weren't tugging and she wasn't tripping on them.
With everything out; the expectation from pretty much everybody was that we would be out today. It even had written on her whiteboard in her room to get discharge ready. But this morning at doctors rounds there was a different idea; instead of Riley being discharged she can go on a day/overnight pass. That means that she gets to leave the hospital this morning and doesn't have to come back until tomorrow morning for doctors round. This way everybody is there to do the discharge properly (on weekends it's a skeleton team) and she doesn't have to mill about the hospital for another day.
So this morning we took her out of the hospital and back to our apartment; we plan on taking it easy for the day. It's been a big couple of weeks. As for when we will return to Mackay; we have been told we need to stick around for a week for some follow up appointments.
We want to say thank you for caring enough to pray, send cards, buy little gifts for Riley, leave encouraging messages on facebook and instagram across this time. We have never felt alone on this journey. We thank God as well (first and foremost) who has been so faithful to us in that we never feared that the operation would be anything but a success; also that she came through this season so well. Finally we want to make note of Jan, Martin and Caleb who supported us practically in Brisbane while we went through all of this whether it was doing our laundry, making us dinners or distracting Maya for us (that one is a big job!).
What's so exciting now is that Riley's future isn't set in stone anymore. After her first two operations we got to live a relatively normal life but we always knew in the back of our minds that we would have to come back. In order for her to continue living it was necessary that she have this final surgery. But now there is nothing on the docket; no surgery we have to be aware of on the horizon. Is it possible she might need a valve replacement or something else in the future? Sure but it's not a guarantee. She will have her cardiologist appointments to monitor her progress every year but her future is now an open book. Her story is now unwritten; nothing cemented on the horizon.
Barring any unforseen issue; Tomorrow she will be discharged from hospital and it will be the first day of a brand new chapter for Riley and our family; we can't wait!
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